


Unexpected

by august_the_real



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-15
Updated: 2015-01-15
Packaged: 2018-03-07 16:38:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3177211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/august_the_real/pseuds/august_the_real
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I've fallen into the hole you say has replaced your soul</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unexpected

Unexpected  
by august (mrsrosiebojangles@gmail.com)

 

Captain Janeway is tired, she has just finished her shift. It is not  
long after The Equinox was destroyed and space and time loom ahead of  
her.

She has an appointment on the holodeck. She runs, a little, because  
she is late.

\---

It is humid. Not hot, exactly - but humid. I can almost taste the  
water as I gulp air. Not many holoprogrammes reach this level of  
accuracy - I wonder who had had the time to design this. It takes a  
few second to adjust to the environmental differences; I notice  
periforally the holodeck doors slide close behind me.

I scan the scene in front of me. It appears to be a market square in  
the middle of a busy city. I do not recognise the city, or the people.  
One way or the other, it is certainly not a Velocity court. I am a  
little disappointed, I was looking forward to not having to think for  
a few hours.

After a few moments, I locate Seven sitting at what looks like a small  
cafe. She is alone, of course, reading a paper text. She looks  
perfectly at ease in her surroundings, has even managed to perfect a  
slouch. I sigh. To anyone else, the posture would not mean a thing. To  
me it represents hours she has wasted perfecting imperfection. It  
reminds me that she hides her implants, that she is ashamed of the  
ability she once embraced. I wondered what the Borg would think of one  
of their drones slouching. A sign of imperfection, I'm sure.

She sees me, eventually, and stands. She does not wave me over - she  
has not learnt that guesture yet and I am glad for it. I enjoy her  
perfection. We stroll towards each other and she nods her greeting.

"Where are we?" I ask.

"Devore." She says simply, her voice giving nothing away. I wonder,  
quickly, what there was to give away.

"No game of velocity today, then?" I try to keep my voice even, not  
critical. I do not ask her where she got a programme of Devore from,  
and I don't even want to consider why she brought me to it.

"B'Elanna asked me to refragment the holodeck storage memory. I found  
this programme embedded in the memory, I suspect Kashyk left it." She  
answers my unasked question coolly.

"Oh?" I don't know why I pretend I do not care – something to think  
about, later.

"You do remember Kashyk, Captain?" Her mouth curved upwards in that  
practised way she had of letting people know she had made a joke. I  
smiled unevenly. We continued walking.

"Where are we going?"

"Shall I change programme, Captain?" She turns to face me.

"What? No. Why would you want to do that?"

"Clearly, this is not to your satisfaction. I apologise, I should have  
realised you had planned for our game of Velocity."

"No. No, Seven, it's fine. This was just – unexpected, that's all. Not  
bad, just unexpected." She seems satisfied with this answer, and we  
continue to walk. There are some market stalls up ahead, it must be  
some sort of fair. People are milling about, there appear to be groups  
of families. It induces a nostalgia, of sorts, but for something I've  
never known.

Seven in uncharacteristically quiet beside me. I am uneasy with this  
apprehension, I am not used to seeing hesitation in my Borg.

I talk to cover the silence. "What a strange programme this is."

"An unusual choice to leave behind."

"Maybe not so unusual. Maybe Kashyk wanted to leave something behind  
that wasn't unpleasant. He wasn't so different from us, Seven. Maybe  
he wanted us to look back fondly, too."

"Was he sucessful in his endeavour?"

"Oh, I don't know. This surprises me. I expect he knew it would."

We have reached the stalls now. On closer inspection, most of them  
seem to be day-to-day provisions: fruit, foods. The holo-characters  
are not intrusive, they do not proffer conversation as we wander  
through their stores, examining the goods.

Seven and I walk some more in silence, not avoiding conversation but  
treading carefully with it. We part company for a few moments,  
separated by a group of Devorans. When I catch a glimpse of her again,  
she is examining some fruit.

"I would have liked to have talked to Kashyk some more." She says,  
quietly, finally. I notice her hands move distractedly over the fruit.  
She is nervous.

"Oh?" I try to feign nonchalance, try to give her the room to follow  
this thought.

"We were quite similar, he and I." She picks up the fruit and holds it  
to her nose. I smile at the guesture and wonder who she learnt it  
from. I decide most probably Neelix. Strange, the things we pick up.

"How do you figure that?"

"In what we do." She stops and corrects herself. "In what I did."

I pick up a similar fruit and hold it to my nose in a repetition of  
her guesture. I don't know why I am surprised when there is no scent.  
"You were both doing your jobs. In a way." I smile behind the fruit at  
the thought of justifying their pasts. I wonder who I am justifying it  
to. For.

"In a way?"

"You were a drone, Seven. You had no conception of morality -- you  
were doing your job." I carefully placed the fruit back onto the pile  
it came from. "Kashyk was doing...what he believed to be right."

"You do not believe it to be so?" We begin walking again, and her  
question settles on me. I am silent, constructing answers that lose  
meaning when I try to articulate them.

"I asked Kashyk to stay." I turn to face her, I want her to hear this  
from me. "I knew what he did…what he had done and I still asked him to  
stay."

"It did not matter to you?"

"Of course it mattered to me, Seven.

"You wanted to remove him from his collective. Like you did me." I see  
straight away what she is getting at; I understood from the very  
beginning.

"Seven, you are very different from Kashyk."

"Yes. You did not *ask* me to stay."

She touches my hand. I note, not for the first time, the textured feel  
of flesh and metal. I cannot help imagining it on my skin, on my lips.  
I have to concentrate on what she has said, on what I will say.

Finally, I say, cowardly, "It is of little relevance what I think. To  
Kashyk, that is."

"I doubt he would have seen it that way. It would have been relevant  
to me."

"As I say, you and Kashyk are different people."

She nods at this, as if I have proffered the correct answer. We fall  
into a pace and follow the winding roads of this city. Despite first  
impressions, the programme is not as interactive as I suspected. The  
citizens we pass have a distinct similarity, it is quite un-nerving.

Seven is quiet and I find myself irrationally angry at this. I want  
her to share the weight of this conversation. I suddenly feel like I  
am being interrogated.

"You admired Kashyk's convictions, then."

"No, not admired."

"You understood them." She says it like a revelation.

I stop. "Yes, in a way. He believed...believes that what he is doing  
is right. Is justified. I can understand holding onto something that  
tightly."

"What did you see in me?" I notice, abstractly, that she moves closer.  
I think perhaps that I should be worried by this, that I should stop  
it...

"I see perfection, Seven." I say, as she touched my arm catiously. I  
watch as her fingers circle my wrist, as they leave white spots where  
she grasps me.

"I am not perfection." She says, moving into my body space  
deliberately.

"I see someone who hasn't let learnt to wonder how things could have  
been different." Hands pacing up my ribs, hands dancing at my throat.  
Like in a dream. "I see someone who has not yet realised what I have  
taken from her." I murmur, watching her twisting my hair around her  
fingers, as if it wasn't me, as if I were outside, away from this  
place, this moment. Her.

And then she stops. I think she finally hears what I am saying - or  
maybe just hears my voice - drenched with the inevitably of defeat as  
it was. She moves away. If I had wanted to, I suppose I could have  
seen that she was hurt.

"Is this what you said to Kashyk?" She says, not looking at me. Her  
voice wavers and all I wonder is whether it is a practised guesture as  
well.

"I told him that we choose things." I stop, almost too embarrassed  
with the memory. "I told him that we have to live well, because it is  
too easy to be bad. And can you imagine what he said to that? He said  
'it appears to me you've chosen neither.'"

"He did not want to leave Devore?" She says, moving past the  
uncertainty.

"No, he didn't see that there was anything worth leaving it for."

We walk.

"I do not feel that way about leaving the collective." She says, after  
a while.

"Ah, but maybe you should."

\---

It begins to rain around us. Eveywhere, the holographic characters  
scrambled for cover. It reminded me so much of home.

"Kashyk told me about this." I said, not to her and glad for the  
distraction. I held my hand up, waiting for the fat drops to settle in  
my palm. They didn't.

"Captain?"

"The rain, Seven. He said that his people believe that summer rain is  
like...like it gets so hot that the sky breaks."

"A hyperbolic folk tale."

"Perhaps." I do not laugh. Her comment is tinged with more than  
jealously.

"Perhaps we should move," she offers. I look around and see we are the  
only ones standing in the open. We come to rest inside a small shop.

Seven brushes her hand across her hair, wiping away the holographic  
rain. I study her, study this moment - it seemed almost real. Metal  
hands wiping away holographic rain. A drone offering herself to her  
autonomon Captain. The question lodges itself between us.

And then I find myself moving forward through this unreality to kiss  
her; knowing already that it would be an ending.


End file.
